A Blog Around The Clock

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Elissa Hoffman, a blogging biology teacher, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
My name is Elissa Hoffman and I’m from Wisconsin. I’m a high school science teacher at Appleton East High School. Specifically, I teach biology and AP Biology. I have a BA in biology with minors in environmental studies and education, and when I was in college we divided biology majors into two categories – “big thing biologists” and “little thing biologists”. I was definitely in the “big thing” group – I had a huge focus on aquatic ecology and spent many happy hours mucking through rivers, Secchi disks and phytoplankton sampling bottles in tow. My senior research project actually involved the feeding behaviors of Daphnia, which required me to do a lot of microvideotaping! Now that I’m teaching, though, my interests have broadened. I still love ecology, but I’m also really passionate about teaching evolution, genetics, botany, and anat/phys.

What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
I added a master’s degree in Educational Leadership a few years ago, so I’m considering a move to school administration. However, given my penchant for setting goals, I’m currently looking at other options as well – debating the merits of various doctoral programs vs. getting another master’s degree. At the moment, given school budget cuts, I’m pretty happy to be where I am!
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
I just love the ability to make connections with real people! Getting the chance to communicate directly with people who are doing actual scientific research or have cool science-related jobs is really, really invigorating.So often we in K-12 education are isolated from people who aren’t part of our school network, and not being connected to current scientific research means that our students aren’t hearing about it! I’ve had several guest bloggers on my class blog who have done a fabulous job of reminding my students that scientific research is still going on – that not all of the cool discoveries have already been made – and that researchers are real people who have social lives and fun personalities.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook?
I have a class blog – I started it in January 2008 on a whim, thinking that since no one at my school was currently blogging with students I might as well try it out. After a few issues with making it work on our server, I unveiled it to the kids who were – well, unimpressed. Most of them had no idea what a blog was. When I talk about it with my new crop of students this fall, most of them STILL will have no idea what a blog is. But they catch on pretty quickly and I think they really like it! I’ve had them write posts, read posts, comment back and forth on each others’ posts, and in general become comfortable with blogs and blog etiquette. I am thinking about using some guest bloggers again this year and anyone who’s interested can email me (hoffmanelissa (at sign) aasd.k12.wi.us).
I’ve also got Twitter accounts (both personal and work-related) and a presence on Facebook. We do set up a class group on Facebook – the kids can join the group (i.e. “Mrs. Hoffman’s AP Bio 2008-09”, etc.) without having to “friend” me, which removes any ickiness or awkwardness. The group lets me distribute email messages to the kids really quickly and also lets me post links, photos, etc. that all of the kids can access.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
Probably sometime in 2007 – I really have no idea how I wandered into it. I do know that once ScienceBlogs picked up steam, it became a very exciting place to lurk! My RSS reader has a mixture of science blogs, health & medicine blogs, education blogs, and mommy blogs – there are an awful lot of favorites in there!
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
I can’t really pinpoint any one particular thing. It was a really great weekend – I was definitely not sure what to expect going into it, wondering if I was going to be in over my head with all of these uber-bloggers, but it worked out pretty well! I loved meeting everyone and having great conversations about science, blogging, and education.
It was so nice to finally meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
It was very nice to meet you – thanks for all you do for blogging and for the conference!!
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Erica Tsai, the co-organizer of the Friday evening events at ScienceOnline’09, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background?
I’m a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Duke University. I’m in the field of comparative phylogeography which means I look at how the geographic ranges of related species change as their shared environment changes. In particular, I study how a parasitic plant (yes, plants can be parasites too!) and its host tree shifted their distributions due to climate changes following the last ice age.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work?
One thing I’ve done in relation to blogging is to help run a high school student science blog. For a few summers (though not currently), I worked with the Howard Hughes Precollege Program at Duke University. This program is targeted at local high schoolers (especially minorities and women) interested in exploring basic science. The students work in research labs and blog about their experiences.
Was it easy to get the students interested in blogging?
In some sense, yes. These students are generally high achieving and good at academics, so they are very amenable to doing whatever is asked of them, which is great! I would guess that they looked at it as yet another “homework assignment”. I regret that we weren’t able to better integrate them into online science communities or to introduce them to online resources.
What do you wish you had taught them?
The blogs were seen as an online diary for each person, and that’s where the interaction ended. There wasn’t a question of reading another person’s diary! That’s missing a major point of online science. There’s the community aspect, even if you are just a lurker. I would have liked to better equip them with online science tools: set them up with an rss reader, point them to Science Blogs, discuss a new article on ScienceDaily, how to set up google alerts/article alerts, etc. I’d be interested in what your readers would put on a list of “Tips and tricks to being part of the online science community”. That’s not to say that some students didn’t figure this out. It just wasn’t due to any training from us! For instance, Trisha Saha, a student in the undergraduate Howard Hughes program, was so savvy she’s now blogging for Nature Network.
What blogging guidelines did you give the students?
I was surprised at the number of restrictions that came up during this process. First were the many privacy issues of the laboratories involved. For instance, I think a student blogged about some protein she was working on as her research project. But, oops, the PI didn’t want it out that they were even working on that protein! Also, there were some safety guidelines (not necessarily pertaining to the students, but rather to protect the labs). For example, students were asked not to post photos of animals, cages, or anything that might inflame anti-animal testing activists. There was some disagreement about how appropriate that rule was, but a conservative approach was taken.
What was the disagreement about?
It was fundamentally about what is the point of the student blogs. The students were asked to do two main things, one stated and the other unstated. Stated: Report honestly and openly about your experiences. Unstated: These experiences should be positive, professional, and noncontroversial. The first of the unstated rules, while off-putting to us rebellious types, wasn’t actually much of an issue. I think this is partly due to the high quality of the program (so there weren’t that many problems to report on), and the natural reticence against airing your dirty laundry in public. This reticence, of course, runs counter to the desire for frankness in a blog, so sometimes their posts took on a glossy sheen. I mean, did you really happily and eagerly redo that failed PCR for a tenth time?
The professional and noncontroversial rules were more challenging for me. For instance, a student posted about where the whole lab went out for lunch; another student wrote about how all the students met to play frisbee. Some administrators were aghast, how unprofessional! What will a college admissions officer think of that? I was thinking, do you know how many food blogs I read? I can’t help feeling like this is where a blogger becomes human. It lends credibility to the realness of their writing and makes them more likable. What’s bad about that? This relates to the broader question of what your online presence should be. Just professional? Some personal? My friends and I have argued about having a ‘personal’ or ‘about me’ tab on our websites. Some are solidly in the “not one iota of personal information”, “it should all be about my research” camp. My counter is, what do you look at when you go to someone’s website? I always go for the ‘personal’ tab. I’m just curious! Maybe I’m searching for a human connection. And that connection makes it more likely I’ll remember you, want to read your papers, and work with you in the future.
The noncontroversial rule is the one, I think, that runs most counter to being a successful and popular blog. Uncontroversial can mean boring. Especially if we scare the kids into writing only positive and professional posts. Uncontroversial can also mean discouraging deep thinking and discussion about an issue. I have one example in mind:
A student was working in a lab that performed animal experiments, where different treatments were given and in the end the animals were euthanized. He described some of the procedures in a post, and did so in a very flippant and callous way. The way it was described was horrible! I imagined PETA or some other activist group swarming down — and with good reason! Obviously, the PI would have used very different language in describing this experiment, as I’m sure he did to an animal ethics board to gain clearance for it. So the short end of the story is that we asked the student to change the language. But the broader point was lost, and I’ve found myself puzzling over how better to handle these situations in the future. His original crude language was essentially truthful, but highly controversial and embarrassing. An activist would argue that if an experiment shorn of scientific jargon is repellent, we shouldn’t be doing it. I’m sensitive to that, but at the same time I wouldn’t want to make any lab a target for bio-terrorism. I wish we had encouraged deeper thinking on the matter and had him write a more thoughtful, measured, analysis of the matter.
What was the point of the student’s blog?
At worst, it’s a way of generating PR for the program, and it gives students practice at writing about science. At best, it gets students to be thoughtful about their experiences, which hopefully expands and deepens the experience. Also, it’d be ideal if it got students to explore topics they wouldn’t normally, and if it challenged them to think really hard about something!
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Thanks so much for interviewing me, Bora! And I enjoyed working with you on the conference very much.
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline’09 back in January.
Today, I asked Djordje Jeremic (yes, he is the son of Tanja Sova), of the Paper Disciple’s Blog, to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? Where are you from? What is your interest in science? How about art?
Why thank you! I am Djordje Jeremic, better known by my alter-ego, Paper Disciple (paperdisciple.etsy.com and paperdisciple.wordpress.com). I am an acolyte of Plicania, the Origami Muse, a beautiful but fickle mistress. [Everyone chill out. Mistress is the female form of Master, and that is what I am referring to.] My Lady graced me with the curiosity and skill in origami at an early age, and while she does not require blood sacrifice (no paper cuts to date), she is a merciless tyrant over my sleep, and she demands attention. But I love her nonetheless, as she has granted me many (read: more than 2) inspirations at times of crisis.
Now, the following is for the skeptics of the existence of goddesses and fairies (heretics!).
I am a legal immigrant (gasp! they do exist!). I began my exo-womb life in a hospital in Yugoslavia, a land which has changed size, shape and name with such agility that it would shame the chameleons, octopi, and cuttlefish of the world put together. Currently it is Serbia, or represented algebraically: Serbia = [(Serbia & Montenegro) – Montenegro – Kosovo…]. Most of my life I have moved around. At twelve I moved to Arizona, and then 2 years later to North Carolina, where I am currently residing and starting to set up some tentative roots.
My main interests in just about anything are divided into the want to know, and the searching for the purpose of said knowledge. It is a great pleasure to find out just how things work. Every time I learn something new, I feel like a child disassembling a watch to see the little gears spinning.
Continuing with the clock metaphor, after opening it and taking the gears out, I would look for a place to use the gears. Not just as a coffee holder, like some are fond of using CD-roms for, but wisely, according to what I learned. Knowledge without purpose is dull, and purpose without knowledge is dangerous. No, not just dangerous, but also slightly stupid.
I like art. [I would like to introduce a word here, if it is alright with everyone. Scotoma is the medical term for having a part of your vision disabled, but it is also a reference to a psychological trick. Remember the picture of the vase, where if you look at it differently, it looks like two faces? That effect.] Scotoma lends the possibility of being able to look at the same piece of art over and over again and every time see a new image. This obviously only works with abstract painting and some other forms, and I LOATHE abstract painting. A block of random splashes does not represent the soul equivalent of a jaguar in a jungle. I respect greatly artists who can work in apparently random smears of pigment and oil, while managing to bring out more than confusion or base emotions from the viewer.
My favorite art genres are extreme realism, and surrealism. Well, not exactly extreme realism, a photo will do, but a well done oil painting is a joy to my heart. [My atrial ventricle flaps excitedly whenever I see any of Rembrandt’s work]. Surrealism I like because it challenges your view of the world. [In Arizona I was participating in a mock Congress. My M.O. was to prepare arguments for both sides of a debate and then fight for the less represented one. I make a magnificent Devil’s Advocate.] Besides, who doesn’t like the image of a reverse magic carpet ride, with the carpet as the rider, rolled up and sitting on a flying human?
What do you want to do/be when (and if ever) you grow up?
A plane pilot. Not a Boeing, however. Being inside a gargantuan monster of steel is not my idea of a fun time. I want a one, maybe two person old style airplane, like the ones they [“They” is a weasel word and is thus not approved by Wikipedia. We’re not on Wikipedia, though.] used in WW1.[not to be confused with www1, the first internet.] I want to feel the rush of the air around me. Come to think of it, the best would be if I could fly unassisted by machines. If it turns out I can’t afford such a plane, I will go skydiving every weekend or so.
For money, I am going to either take people for rides, or fold origami professionally. Maybe even get a decent job [only if I have to]. There’s not much to it. Living like the squirrel: eat what you need, store up only for one winter, and never stay too long in one place. And, everywhere I go, I will bring my trusty laptop and wi-fi hijacker [don’t have one yet] although by the time I am 25, this very computer I am typing on and the one you are reading from will both be relics in a museum, antiques at best.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
The increased speed and accuracy of facts. The internet serves as a library full of librarians and writers and proofreaders. If you wanted to check what the coagulation speed of 10 milliliters of baboon blood were (just a shot in the dark, I don’t know why I picked the examples), all that is necessary is several clicks to get mostly accurate information. The world wide web, in my opinion, is a handy tool to have around, but is not a supplement to all research.
I like PloS. I do not use it as much as I would like to, but the times that I do it is educational and even fun. Every time I go there, it is like throwing darts at a carnival, but you can’t miss.
How does (if it does) blogging figure in your life and work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? What are some of the differences in the ways teenagers use the Web in comparison to adults who grew up without it and later in life migrated online?
I started my blog recently, 1) as a tool of flagrant self promotion, which I used mercilessly to herd millions into buying my origami on etsy. I wish. To my knowledge, the site was only visited by a couple of people, few of which bought something. 2) as a vent for my teenage angst, romance, and idiocy. It was my wall to graffiti on. Still is.
I cannot tell what it is like to be an adult who migrated, since I am 16, but as a teenager who grew up next to it, it is natural, like an arm. The way dolphins probably viewed the ocean prior to all the filth we [homo sapiens (severe irony. sapiens means wise. )] dumped into it.
When and how did you discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any new cool science blogs while at the Conference?
I did not discover scienceblogs.com, I was dragged headfirst into it, kicking and screaming, only to find it a nice place with polite people. I usually keep to Blog around the clock (HI BORA!) and Pharyngula, but every now and then I will trawl for fresh waters. I can’t name all the people who I visited here, but they all have brilliant ideas.
Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your studies, art, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Yes. My favorites were discovering that there are adolescents of my mental age blogging, as well as the fact that there are a LOT of people who are great company, all of them as geeky as I am and probably more. That, and it also appears that scienceblogs.com is not run by one man in a missile silo in colorado.
It was so nice to meet you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
(Christopher Walken voice) And I… shall see you, there. *insert creepy Mr. Burns-esque photo here*
==========================
See the 2008 interview series and 2009 series for more.